He's back

So, it looks as if Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled off a victory in his bid for re-election, after all.

What a surprise.

All the indications were that Mr. Ahmadinejad had been locked in a close election battle with his principal challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi. Mr. Moussavi's campaign had drawn enormous, enthusiastic crowds and some polls suggested he actually was leading going into Friday's election.

The challenger cause was helped immensely by widespread dissatisfaction with the government's disastrous economic program and the compulsion of Mr. Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guard, to antagonize the United States and European governments.

But the incumbent won a second four-year term handily. In fact, less than two hours after the polls closed, the Interior Ministry broke all precedents and hastened to announce that Mr. Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, with nearly 63 percent of the vote to Mr. Moussavi's 34 percent.

According to the government, Mr. Ahmadinejad even captured many of the districts considered Moussavi strongholds.

Quite a turnaround.

Of course, there has been widespread suspicion that the government officials counting the votes were ordered to do so in order to produce a certain outcome -- i.e., a victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

For his part, the freshly re-elected president said the election was "real and free."

But, then, of course, he would say that.

The shocking outcome of an election in which forward-looking Iranians had invested so much hope has led to several days of violent demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere in the country, as backers of Mr. Moussavi and his reformist movement express their outrage.
And the Iranian authorities have responded just as you might imagine -- with a tough, across-the-board crackdown on dissent. Hundreds have been jailed and many foreign journalists have been ordered to leave the country. Yesterday, seven protesters were killed by security forces.

That sounds ominously like a precursor to even more brutal repression in what had been one of the more open Muslim countries.

And with this election triumph -- real or sham -- in hand, Mr. Ahmadinejad and his radical allies may well see it as a mandate to consolidate his regime's grip on the country and crush the nascent reform movement. It's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine that when his next four-year term is set to expire, there will be no elections in Iran. In short, he's back -- and probably with a vengeance.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran to whom Mr. Ahmadinejad bows, yesterday called for an investigation into election irregularities, according to the New York Times.

But that investigation will be conducted by the Guardian Council, which ran the election and is closely aligned with the president who greatly increased its funding in the run-up to the election.

The probe is probably only a show, meant to defuse current tensions which have brought millions of outraged Iranians to the streets. It seems likely that, in the face of government repression and renewed cynicism, the opposition protests will eventually subside.

The election is also a setback for all those in the West who had hoped that Iran's 30-year spasm of rule by radical Islamic fundamentalists was coming to an end and a more reasonable, moderate government might emerge. The only question now is how deep into the totalitarian abyss will the triumphal Mr. Ahmadinejad will take his troubled nation.

Now, that hope is suspended indefinitely and millions of disillusioned Iranians face a bleak future and Iran's neighbors face at least four more years of Mr. Ahmadinejad's volatile ideology.